Well, obviously it's o.k. for someone like him ..., but the thing which interested me the most is the average price he suggests for a decent cake for a given age. For new cakes, that would be US$30, 5 yr would be $75, 10yr $230 etc.

1) Generally, it's a bad idea to have *one* great old cake. Just way too much guilt and expectations. You also don't have the benefit of building up a proper relationship with that tea, if you only ever have it a few times a year. That's when you need friends to help with the brewing, and the guilt-free drinking.

2) If you're seriously interested in pu, especially as a hobby, at some point, you *must* buy tongs, at least one tong of sheng a year, and one of shu, if you like that sort of thing. The idea is to eventually have a rotation of good aged tea that you can drink most every day, so long as you buy that one tong of good tea. Puerh, properly satisfying, is capital intensive. Teas safe for tonging, these days, are anywheres from $30-$70, and really, most of it is going to be in the upper range.

3) I think it's pretty foolhardy to expect to have ancient tea when you're ancient. Expect practical maturity to be 10-15 years. So if you like ~20 years puerh, buy ~10 years puerh for keeping. So forth and on. Life is just too happening.

4) Don't get caught up about aging any old puerh. Some you will want to age, but there will be many areas that you will love fresh, and only fresh. No shame in that. Also, various areas have distinctly different aging patterns, and you should always have tried a decent older example of a recipe or area before committing to a tong.

As for Cloud...

I have zero means of buying 30yo cakes, aside from maybe that Xiaguan tuocha at Houde. Everything else is so mindboggling expensive and tricky to buy. Furthermore, that he'd go down in stages of five years is wierd. I can only see myself buying 15 yo cakes. Cheap 15 yo cakes. Which would be unlikely because I like other things better than affordable 15 yo puerh. And I'd drink *that* anytime I'd like? No way. A 15 yo cake I'd want to drink is about $500 or so these days? That's $10 a session. Even if I cut it down to a more appropriate 3.5g session, that's still $5 a session--which adds up if you drink often. I do plan on getting tongs of 10yo sheng, but that's because you can still find good stuff in tongable price ranges, and I'd definitly drink until I'm bored of it for awhile. Right now, my primary everyday shengs are about 5 yo, and I have next to no cakes for storage only because I'm only doing that for extremely premium cakes.

The price he suggest is actually pretty reasonable when you break it down over the long term.

30yrs = $39,179 = $130/cakeYr = $1,305 Mo = $108Day = $3.57

Having a chunk of start up cash and access to endless amounts of free sampling makes this possible. Going by his prices i think it would involve buying at least 1 cake a month plus a few tongs each year just to get started. Thats assuming you go by his chart and only drink 10yr+ daily.

Add in a few newer tongs and your looking at another $500/yr. Focusing on drinking only aged tea and spending $7000 a year on building a tea collection is too much for most of us here. I'm curious to see what kind of buying strategy Cloud would come up with to back his 30yr plan.

I think collecting aged puerh can be expensive but drinking it every day isn't that bad. You can get about 50 session from a cake if you consume 7g each time. If you like variety and only want to drink the same tea twice a month than it'll last you 2 years. Going by that you would only need to have 15 cakes. Even if each cake cost $200 it only ends up costing $3000 to have 2 years stock. The cost would obviously be higher if i'm buying more expensive teas. That means each year i need to buy 7 new cakes to maintain stock as well as adding variety so that those first cakes will last more than 2 years. This type of plan would work for me since my objective is to drink aged tea everyday instead aging it myself. I don't make a lot of money so i cant have endless amounts of tea sitting around that i don't consume because it doesn't fit my taste yet.

G-off-re wrote:I think collecting aged puerh can be expensive but drinking it every day isn't that bad. You can get about 50 session from a cake if you consume 7g each time. If you like variety and only want to drink the same tea twice a month than it'll last you 2 years. Going by that you would only need to have 15 cakes. Even if each cake cost $200 it only ends up costing $3000 to have 2 years stock. The cost would obviously be higher if i'm buying more expensive teas. That means each year i need to buy 7 new cakes to maintain stock as well as adding variety so that those first cakes will last more than 2 years. This type of plan would work for me since my objective is to drink aged tea everyday instead aging it myself. I don't make a lot of money so i cant have endless amounts of tea sitting around that i don't consume because it doesn't fit my taste yet.

I know this is an old thread, but I saw it a while back and wonder why it didn't get more discussion.

Being new Puerh and very much enjoying it, I am thinking about ways to mix it/budget it in with my other habits/hobbies.

I think G-off-re plan here make some good sense.

My desire is to be able to drink good tea daily have some aging and perhaps be able to buy some for special occasions. I’ll never have the money to buy 30 year old stuff. But over time may have some, if I live that long

I recently bought a fair amount of samples. My plan is to pick the best one or two of the older one, 10 years old or so, and buy cakes of those. Now I have good tea for every day. As I consume these I will continue to sample and pick others to buy.

Buying the first couple/few cakes with be the largest start up expense. After that you can budget an amount for cakes and samples each month. Using the 50 sessions a cake number if you buy two to start with that’s 100 sessions, that’s over three months. Now each month you will buy a cake, and every 3rd cake or so buy something a little younger to let age and save a little money. After 3 months of buying one cake, plus the 2 start up cakes (and drinking every day) you will have enough tea for 160 sessions, and after a year 340. So as you see after a while there will be tea sitting and aging.

After a while if there is an older more expensive cake you desire you can easily skip a month or two of buying to be able to buy it.

Some of the numbers floating around this discussion here seem to be a bit inflated for me.Why would one need "7 gramm" of tea per session? The amount of tea has to suit the size of the tea pot and the particular tea - use a smaller pot, if possible an older pot with good clay which will give also more infusions, and use good water. I do not drink for quantity, but for quality, and use an 80 cc pot, and - depending on the tea and compression - fill it about one third with leaves, some teas more, some less. I can drink for at least two hours from one pot. I would not know how much "gramm" of tea that is, i only know that i get far more than 50 pots from one cake.

For aging purposes one does not need to buy the most expensive teas around. Don't forget that some of the now most famed aged Pu Erh's started off as cheap plantation blends that nobody wanted then. There is always some amount of luck involved in aging Pu Erh anyhow, and factors such as storing conditions play a large role as well. Spreading is better, a few cakes of blended Pu Erh, some cakes of wild and some of ancient arbor. One does not need to necessarily buy tongs, especially of the more expensive teas.

Buying semi aged Pu Erh does not need to be extremely expensive. If one leaves hyped teas aside, and especially Menghai Dayi, and looks for small factory products, one can get lucky as well, and can find very nice teas for much less. One of the great joys is to look for rare small factory tea, instead of religiously following the hype. I find also that Yiwu teas age quicker than others (don't ask me why), and so, when i buy semi aged tea (5 to 10 years old) to drink relatively soon - i often look for Yiwu teas to test first.Look for tea stored in Malaysia - the climate there makes for much quicker aging. Just try them first - there is always the danger that too much humidity got into them.

Buying smart, one can buy within a few years a large enough stock of teafor consumption, and put enough tea away for aging. Then it just needs a bit of re-stocking here and there for further aging, ready to drink when the old stock is depleted.For the most part i was lucky over the past ten years, and bought only a few duds that turned into flat and boring soups.

As to rising prices - we'll have to wait and see. There are tea bubbles, and there is normal economics. Bubbles rarely benefit the farmers - the benefit the horders mostly. Right now there seems to be a huge Liu Bao bubble, prices for this tea is getting absurdly astronomical now - teas that a few years ago you could have gotten for a dime, and nobody then thought of buying, now hundreds of dollars are asked, and people stock up and hord. Ten years ago, for example, i bought about 200 gramm of 70 year old Liu Bao (now long finished) for maybe 40 US$ - this tea now would make me poor.

theredbaron wrote:Some of the numbers floating around this discussion here seem to be a bit inflated for me.Why would one need "7 gramm" of tea per session? The amount of tea has to suit the size of the tea pot and the particular tea - use a smaller pot, if possible an older pot with good clay which will give also more infusions, and use good water. I do not drink for quantity, but for quality, and use an 80 cc pot, and - depending on the tea and compression - fill it about one third with leaves, some teas more, some less. I can drink for at least two hours from one pot. I would not know how much "gramm" of tea that is, i only know that i get far more than 50 pots from one cake.

For aging purposes one does not need to buy the most expensive teas around. Don't forget that some of the now most famed aged Pu Erh's started off as cheap plantation blends that nobody wanted then. There is always some amount of luck involved in aging Pu Erh anyhow, and factors such as storing conditions play a large role as well. Spreading is better, a few cakes of blended Pu Erh, some cakes of wild and some of ancient arbor. One does not need to necessarily buy tongs, especially of the more expensive teas.

Buying semi aged Pu Erh does not need to be extremely expensive. If one leaves hyped teas aside, and especially Menghai Dayi, and looks for small factory products, one can get lucky as well, and can find very nice teas for much less. One of the great joys is to look for rare small factory tea, instead of religiously following the hype. I find also that Yiwu teas age quicker than others (don't ask me why), and so, when i buy semi aged tea (5 to 10 years old) to drink relatively soon - i often look for Yiwu teas to test first.Look for tea stored in Malaysia - the climate there makes for much quicker aging. Just try them first - there is always the danger that too much humidity got into them.

Buying smart, one can buy within a few years a large enough stock of teafor consumption, and put enough tea away for aging. Then it just needs a bit of re-stocking here and there for further aging, ready to drink when the old stock is depleted.For the most part i was lucky over the past ten years, and bought only a few duds that turned into flat and boring soups.

As to rising prices - we'll have to wait and see. There are tea bubbles, and there is normal economics. Bubbles rarely benefit the farmers - the benefit the horders mostly. Right now there seems to be a huge Liu Bao bubble, prices for this tea is getting absurdly astronomical now - teas that a few years ago you could have gotten for a dime, and nobody then thought of buying, now hundreds of dollars are asked, and people stock up and hord. Ten years ago, for example, i bought about 200 gramm of 70 year old Liu Bao (now long finished) for maybe 40 US$ - this tea now would make me poor.

Agree, the 50 sessions number was ot there so I used it. With more steeps per cakes the math gets even better in your favor.